(gentle music)
- Well, I was born in Buffalo, New York during World War II.
My father was stationed in Europe at the time.
After the war, we moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico
where he started working at the laboratory.
Well, one thing about growing up in Los Alamos
is that there were hardly any Black people there.
And I think there were three Black families there.
I never had a class
in which there was another Black student.
This was in the early 1960s
when people my age were getting noticed.
The sit-ins were taking place,
Martin Luther King and Montgomery, the Freedom Rides.
So my understanding of the Black world out there
was that a lot of exciting things were happening in it.
When I went to college, eventually ending up at UCLA,
I had a chance to meet some of these students.
I met Stokely Carmichael, for example,
right before the March on Washington.
He seemed to be my role model,
in the sense we were young, a young person
who was taking an active role in the movement.
Actually, he somewhat discouraged me
from going to the March on Washington.
He said, "Why would you want to go
"to that picnic in Washington?"
But I was somewhat hesitant to telling him
that going to the March on Washington
was the most militant thing I'd ever done in my life.
I went to the March by myself,
far more Black people than I ever seen in my life.
I knew that this was something historic,
something beyond my experience.
For me, the highlight was when John Lewis spoke,
because John was someone I would later get to know,
that at that time he was the youngest person
speaking at the March.
Obviously, like everybody else though, everyone was waiting
for Martin Luther King to give the concluding address.
And even as he's speaking,
I remember myself kind of thinking,
"How am I going to get out of here?
"There's going to be 200,000 people rushing for the buses."
And I actually never did find the bus that I came on.
It was a really thrilling event.
I don't think I would be here doing the work I'm doing now,
talking to you about this if I had not done that.
In 1974, I came to Stanford.
I was hired here as an acting assistant professor.
I was still finishing up my dissertation.
So I've been here for 46 years now.
One of the things I found from the very beginning
is that I typically taught the courses
that weren't being taught before,
whether that's African-American history
or labor history, urban history.
And then in January of 1985,
Coretta Scott came, called me
and asked whether I'd be interested
in editing the papers of her late husband.
I certainly didn't know the scale
of what I was getting into,
how many hundreds of thousands of documents.
And here we are, 35 years later, still at it.
I've always been more interested in teaching
and using the documents as sources.
I see that as a much more lasting contribution I can make.
People see Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader,
but I see him as a human rights leader.
And I think in some ways achieving civil rights
has made us very complacent about human rights.
And there's no longer a Jim Crow system,
but no one would argue that there's equal opportunity
for all races or all people.
No one would argue that the world is inherently just.
The protests that happened over the last year,
indicate that young people understand that.
They were able to mobilize a movement larger
than the March on Washington.
Now, when I think about that, when I know all the work
that went into the March on Washington
and all the great organizers spent months trying
to bring 200,000 people to the National Lawn.
Young people brought two million people,
within a couple of days, into the streets.
And to me that showed the power of modern media.
And I think that holds promise for the future.
Maybe at this stage in my career,
I've been really focusing on where was King
at the end of his life,
and particularly that book that he writes,
"Where Do We Go From Here?"
I think it's his unanswered question.
We have to decide where are we going
as a society, as a world.
It's not at all certain that the world is going
to bend toward justice.
We have a lot of responsibility.